New paintings and regular art updates.
What TV shows did you watch as a kid?
I loved star trek
My favourite?
Spock
So stoical and bright
Please don’t mock!
Kirk, I liked him to
A bit overdramatic
An excitable character
Swashbuckling and hectic
McCoy was the doctor
You’d like to see
He made me laugh
Humour was his key.
Scotty, engineer, brave
Could fix any problem
Given enough time
And not caused by a Romulan!
Afternoon tea
Relaxing after the play
Could hardly move
Sister drove us to it
Garden centre
Beautiful summer flowers.
Yes I was tired
But I was tempted
So after tea?
Bought more flowers.
Choir was hard tonight, we were somehow bad with our timing, a bit out of tune and spent 40 minutes going over one piece of a song. We all seemed a bit tired, and our section was singing the main tune (we generally sing the backing part). It didn’t help that were singing “to make you feel my love” by Bob Dylan, but some of us were singing the Adele version!
By the time we had finished we had warmed up to the rehearsal and sounded a lot better.
Being in a choir is great for your mental health and helps you socialise, you can find lots of local choirs in the UK, so why not try it out?
Been to choir twice today
Morning songs, evening tunes
Now I’m tired and so I lay
On the chair, ready to sleep.
Music gave me a good day
Raised my spirits up in joy
Made me feel less dark I’d say
Summer returned
When that music did play…
Do you sing for pleasure, to earn money, to learn something new? Or for mental or physical health?
Singing is good for lung health. It can strengthen both your lungs, chest muscles and help improve your voice. It helps with breathing and can help control your worries. I’ve found it helpful with controlling anxiety. It doesn’t cure it, but it calms it. Yes you could get stage fright, but singing with a choir helps because you are singing with others and that supports all the participants. You learn together and grow together. After about 20 years of singing with the group we sound pretty good. New people join and the group changes, but we all enjoy going or we wouldn’t be there
Some songs are earworms, rolling round and round in your head. Others are hard to pick up. We sometimes drop a tone or sing flat. It’s hard as a low singer to hit the high notes. Some songs are really annoying, but others in the group love them. But as we are all different then we all like a variety of music. Participating is good for you. I’d recommend it to anyone.
What activities do you lose yourself in?
Painting makes my mind flow…
Koi carp painted a few years ago. I love all sorts of art. It engages my mind as I create. The world and time just seems to disappear.
I might start painting or drawing in the afternoon, then suddenly realise I’m hungry or thirsty and find it’s 3am and I’ve lost half a day….
It’s just hand eye coordination, and often putting liquids onto a surface, or shading with pencils or pastels, but something grips me and I am embedded into art.
I love visual art, taking photos, and sometimes I even attempt 3d art in ceramics. I have only ever tried to carve stone a couple of times but didn’t have the strength.
Art encourages creative thoughts. I’d recommend it to anyone. Try it, you might enjoy it. X
At Miso Japanese Restaurant in London Road, Stoke-on-Trent. Lovely food. I’m so happy that I was able to take my relative out there for a birthday supper.
Sushi and then Bento boxes with Plum wine to drink. It was an extravagant evening, but a real pleasure..
Miso is mentioned in Richard Osman’s book “The bullet that missed”, it’s a crime novel. Part of The Thursday Murder Club series. The owner of the restaurant didn’t know that Osman had written about it!
One of the loveliest and unusual songs we sing at choir practice is River River.
These are words from memory but I think they are pretty accurate. I had to look up the writers name as we didn’t have it. I hope I’m not breaching copyright by writing out the lyrics? I will delete ths post if here is a problem?
River River where do you flow
With your water the colour of tea
Gold and red in your sandy bed
Do you flow to the wide green sea?
No said the river I flow inland
Sink down deep beneath the rock and the sand.
Under the Geeji and the Mugar tree
Where the desert people can find me
Earth belongs to all, she belongs to no one, she belongs to herself
Earth belongs to all, she belongs to no one, she belongs to herself…..
I was answering someone’s question about how it goes because they recently joined the choir, and I see an image a bit like my drawing in my mind when I sing it.
Which activities make you lose track of time?
Art, and particularly painting is where I get “flow”, that is lose track of time when I’m creating art. Sometimes I can go months without painting, but I still create things either by drawing or working on digital art.
From my earliest memories I can remember painting and drawing. It got to the stage where my mom would show relatives my art because she thought they were good. I only had half a bedroom because I shared and that was on the window side, so to display my art I strung strings across the bedroom and hung my pictures from them!
I was obsessed with Elizabethan fashions and used to draw women and men in great dresses and suits of silk, with slashed sleeves and enormous ruffs around their necks. I was also interested in the Asterix the Gaul and would copy the cartoons of him and the other characters. I would spend hours getting the images correct. I think that was when I started getting better at drawing.
I remember spending hours over my art exam paintings. In fact one of my paintings was selected to be put on display at our twin town in Europe.
I think they say you have to do something for 10,000 hours to become an expert. I must have done far more than that. But the time has flown and I don’t recall it being hard work, “time just flies when you are having fun” is a saying that I think is based on what happens when you do an activity and you lose track of time.
If humans had taglines, what would yours be?
I had to look this up:
“In entertainment, a tagline is a short text which serves to clarify a thought for, or is designed with a form of, dramatic effect. Many tagline slogans are reiterated phrases associated with an individual, social group, or product. Wikipedia”
I would say I’m a “pattern loving gal”? Does that work as a tagline for me? I add patterns to most of my art, and the older I get the more I seem to do it. The three words explain my feelings about art. My genuine enjoyment of entanglements and textures. My enjoyment of and involvement with pattern in my art and designs.
I cannot think of any better description.
Mallaband-Brown